Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
What generic base-frameworks or base-metaframeworks do we need, to support sensemaking and decision-making across the full scope of enterprise-architectures? How do we create those frameworks in real-world practice? This is the fourth of five worked-examples of metaframeworks in practice – on how…
Six years ago I posted a blog article called Solution Architect Skills Idea. At the time, I was a practicing Solution Architect pushing the boundaries to mature the Solution Architect discipline. I built the Solution Architect Skills Assessment to help organize the skills I felt were necessary to be a world class Solution Architect and used it to mentor folks interested in growing their Solution Architect skills. The skills taxonomy was later used to help form IASA’s Solution Architecture skills profile which, I think, is still used today. Funny, I still get contacted regarding help with Solution Architecture skills because the Excel workbook I used to store the skill information was passed around with my name still in the document author properties. Because of the viral use of the skills taxonomy and feedback from folks tell me how useful it was, I consider it a pretty good success.
Anyway, a few years ago, I shifted professions into a Business Architect role and have learned tons. I now know enough through learning from business management experts and through my own practical experience that I feel comfortable helping others in the area of Business Architecture. I’ve even begun to accept a few mentees and am using the Business Architect Skills Assessment to shape their learning roadmap. The feedback is very positive so I thought I’d share it on my blog. Keep in mind that it is only a start that needs maturing. I’ll try to keep it current with my personal copy as time goes on.
I hope the Business Architect Skills Assessment proves useful to you too: Gabriel’s Business Architect Skills Assessment workbook
@anniemurphypaul advises us how to increase our powers of observation – by emulating scientists. “As practiced by scientists”, she writes, “observation is a rigorous activity that integrates what the scientists are seeing with what they already know and what they think might be true.”
Here are some tips that she draws from an article by Eberbach and Crowley.
It may be useful here to distinguish between Field Notes and a Field Journal. Field Notes contain a record of what has been seen or heard by the observer. Whereas the Field Journal contains a record of ideas, thoughts, interpretations and other material. In particular, the Field Journal records anything else that was going on at the time, which later reflection may determine to have influenced the observations.
Sheldon Greaves outlines the approach adopted by Joseph Grinnell, who kept detailed records of his observations from 1894 to 1939, and who was Director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley for most of that time.
“The idea behind the Grinnell system is to turn you from a passive recorder of information into a participant in a dialogue with nature. Rather than just recording bits of data, you poke, explore and cross-examine nature in order to sluice nuggets of knowledge from what you see.”
But in her review of Molly Gloss’s short story The Grinnell method (Sept 2012), Maureen Kincaid Speller offers a detailed critique of the Grinnell method for observing human affairs, and complains that “there seems to be no place in Grinnell’s method for analysis, just the ongoing accumulation of information”.
Which is clearly why we also need extended reflection.
Annie Murphy Paul, How To Increase Your Powers of Observation (Time Ideas, May 2012)
Catherine Eberbach, Kevin Crowley From Everyday to Scientific Observation: How Children Learn to Observe the Biologist’s World (abstract) Review of Educational Research March 2009 vol. 79 no. 1 39-68 doi: 10.3102/0034654308325899
Cathryn Carson, Writing, Writing, Writing: The Natural History Field Journal as a Literary Text (Feb 2007)
Jamie Cromertie, How to keep your field notes and journal,
Sheldon Greaves, Making, Maintaining, and Using Serious Field Notes (Feb 2012)
Paul Handford, Notes on Keeping a Field Journal,
Betsy Mason, Beautiful Data: The Art of Science Field Notes (Wired Science, July 2011)
Places are still available on my Organizational Intelligence workshop, November 22nd.
Deal and Kennedy (1982) proposed a model of organizational culture, which depended on two factors, risk and the speed of feedback.
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| Source: Deal and Kennedy |
Meanwhile, speed of feedback also affects organizational intelligence. Shorter feedback loops are associated with greater agility and responsiveness, and faster learning, and is a popular meme of the Agile Software movement. Shahzad Bhatti is one of those who emphasizes the link with John Boyd’s OODA loop.
“One of key finding he made was that shorter feedback or iteration loop of OODA with low quality was better than longer or tiring cycle of OODA with high quality. Despite the fact that everyone calls his/her organization agile, this feedback loop is real essense of agility.”
So that seems to associate Agile with the upper two quadrants of the Deal and Kennedy model, and OODA with the top left quadrant.
So then what are the cultural implications of Agile for the host organization?
Notes and references
Lisa Crispin, Shortening the Feedback Loop (March 2011)
Ilan Kirschenbaum, What does a butterfly say at the end of the day? (May 2012)
Rune Larsen, Know your feedback loop – why and how to optimize it (Oct 2012)
Thomas Sundberg, Why should you use different technical practises when you develop software? (April 2011)
Places are still available on my Organizational Intelligence workshop, November 22nd.
As we start to navigate our way into this topic of mastery, I’d like to explore attention and perception further. Louis Agassiz became known well beyond his own field for teaching observation, and many of his students relay similar stories of how he imbued this … Continue reading →
Six years ago I posted a blog article called Solution Architect Skills Idea. At the time, I was a practicing Solution Architect pushing the boundaries to mature the Solution Architect discipline. I built the Solution Architect Skills Assessment to help organize the skills I felt were necessary to be a world class Solution Architect and…
Guest Post by David Nardoni The responsibility of conducting mobile forensic investigations in the workplace should fall in the lap of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Unfortunately, 58% of organizations do not have a CISO, according to our recent Global State of Information Security Survey of 9,300 senior executives. Often the CIO is tasked with leading efforts to collect evidence when foul play is suspected. Fetching data from mobile devices is fraught with challenges […]
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The device ecosystem is growing faster with the ready availability of gadgets for personal and professional use. The application landscape is on the climb with the addition of Cloud, social, mobile and sensor services. Amongst the most captivating technologies, the Cloud technology stands out. Continue reading →
For some time now I have been promoting the idea that the practice of business architecture is not about creating blueprints and models but applying a set of tools and techniques to form broader perspectives, create deeper insight, and solve business problems. If business architecture is a practice then what is its portfolio of services? […]
The satellite model is an alternative representation of complex architectures that is propagated by me as a more helpful metaphor than layered models or complex graphs. It helps because it centres on the centre: the business or company domain. The model re-appears in many articles on my site, and in some representations by other authors: […]
Het bericht The satellite model verscheen eerst op Rob Vens.
What frameworks do we need to make sense of relationships, interdependencies and dynamics across the the whole of an enterprise? This is the third of five worked-examples of metaframeworks in practice – on how to hack and ‘smoosh-together’ existing frameworks to create…
Hashtags work. At least on Twitter. People sacrifice precious characters to tag their tweets. Why they work? They are emergent*. Nobody owns them. And they have the fate they deserve. A tagged micro-post becomes immediately a member of the set of all micro-posts having this tag. The main function is to direct the tweets to […]